In plain words: It trains a network with a hard energy budget built in, trimming weights and blocking some inputs while estimating energy use during training. The result beats the best earlier energy-saving training, reaching higher accuracy at the same or lower energy cost.
Abstract · Energy-Constrained Compression for Deep Neural Networks via Weighted Sparse Projection and Layer Input Masking
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are increasingly deployed in highly energy-constrained environments such as autonomous drones and wearable devices while at the same time must operate in real-time. Therefore, reducing the energy consumption has become a major design consideration in DNN training. This paper proposes the first end-to-end DNN training framework that provides quantitative energy consumption guarantees via weighted sparse projection and input masking. The key idea is to formulate the DNN training as an optimization problem in which the energy budget imposes a previously unconsidered optimization constraint. We integrate the quantitative DNN energy estimation into the DNN training process to assist the constrained optimization. We prove that an approximate algorithm can be used to efficiently solve the optimization problem. Compared to the best prior energy-saving methods, our framework trains DNNs that provide higher accuracies under same or lower energy budgets. Code is publicly available.
Haichuan Yang, Yuhao Zhu, Ji Liu
arXiv:1806.04321 · cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Jun 12, 2018 · updated Jun 2, 2019
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